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Sanssouci, a palace in Potsdam near Berlin, Germany. It’s famous for it’s beautiful gardens, and those gardens are what Michael Kiesling wants you to recreate in the game named Sanssouci. But it’s not about their beauty, their symmetry or even their completion. All you care for is: how far down the garden paths can someone walk?

Abstract strategy games for two players. There are many of them already, you could think that all the good ideas have been done. And then a game like Coerceo comes along, completely redefines how you use the board in a classic black-vs-white abstract game and is all fresh and exciting. You should never consider a genre complete, there are always great ideas still to be dicovered.

In Roboburg, the robotic inhabitants work every day of the year, without vacations, without weekends. Except for six days every year when the robo fair comes to town. Then all the robots go and have fun on the fair rides. There’s a lot of money to be made for you as a fair owner, that’s for sure. If you can just attract the right crowd.

Combining boardgames with mobile apps into a game that people actually want to play is the current Philosophers’ Stone and Holy Grail rolled into one for game designers and publishers. The Philosophers’ Grail, maybe. Previous attempts have had lukewarm success at best. But Alchemists is the first in a new wave of games with companion app, and it might just have found the magic formula how do it right.

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the adventures of giant turtle Great A’tuin, her four elephant companions standing on her shell and the millions of people living on the world they carry. This is the Discworld, and that muddy brown spot over there is Ankh-Morpork, home to a million people and more drama than any other city in the multiverse.

In 2050, running a global enterprise isn’t an easy job. Profit is still the top priority, of course, but because of government regulation and consumer behavior, you can no longer ignore sustainability issues. You either take care of the environment, of your employees and of society as a whole, or all the profits in the world won’t save your company. Balance between those concerns is not always easy, but if you run your company well it’s possible.

Uwe Rosenberg is well known for his deep, complex games like Agricola, Glass Road or Fields of Arle. But those are not all he does, he’s equally skilled at small and deceptively simple looking games. In this one, you don’t have to feed your starving farmers, you don’t work and pray in a monastery, you don’t even sell your vegetables at the gates of Loyang. All you have to do is simply make a patchwork blanket.

Québec is not only a city in Canada any more, it is now also a game about that city. But where games with city names are often variants of other games with some new pictures, Québec introduces new mechanics and really invents a new game, not just renames it.